Enterprise software systems are typically sophisticated, large-scale systems that support many, e.g., hundreds or thousands, of concurrent users. Examples of enterprise software systems include financial planning systems, budget planning systems, order management systems, inventory management systems, sales force management systems, business intelligent tools, enterprise reporting tools, project and resource management systems and other enterprise software systems.
In many situations, a user may wish to publish data from one enterprise software system to other third party software tools. As one example, the user may wish to publish data from a financial planning system to reporting and analysis software. However, many enterprise software systems, such as financial planning systems, store data in multidimensional data cubes. It is often difficult to publish data from the multidimensional environment of the enterprise software system to reporting software, which typically stores data in a relational database. In other words, the multidimensional nature of the enterprise software system is often incompatible with the two-dimensional relational format utilized by the reporting software.
For example, multidimensional data cubes consist of multiple dimensions and measures. In general, a dimension is a structural attribute of a data cube that is an organized hierarchy of categories. For example, a geography dimension might include levels for country, region, state or province, and city. Measures represent the data values along the cells of the dimension.
In some situations measures within a multidimensional data cube vary with data type and formatting along the dimensions of the data cube. For example, a defined measure may vary from a string data type for certain cells along a dimension to a numerical data type for different cells depending on the different dimensions of the data cube. Consequently, it is often difficult to publish the data cube and correctly represent the format and data type of the measures.
As a result, many conventional enterprise systems published the multidimensional data in a simple text format. However, this prevents the reporting software from being able to perform further calculations and analysis on the published data.